Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom

IMDB
First time viewed: No
Current Release: No
Watched With: Jordan, Naomi

That's the best trailer I could find, but we watched it in Italian. Although with the Italians habit of never recording sound live and post-synching everything if probably wouldn't have made much difference.

So Quills was really just a warm up to this film which is actually based around one of the Marquis de Sade's stories, transplanted to fascist Italy. But it's one thing to watch a film about these graphic and perverted stories and another entirely to see then acted out. It's basically what happens when someone actually performs the Aristocrats joke. Arguably, it makes the same point too.

It's a famously controversial film, one that's only been available in Australia for a few years now, since its original release. There's some most unpleasant acts perpetrated by and to kids. A lot of rape, a fair share of graphic violence and too much poo eating for any one film. There really is quite a lot poo.

It's also quite slow and meandering and feels aimless at times, like it's just forcing the audience to watch these grotesque perversions for the sake of it. Its is gratuitous? Is it art? Does it have merit? I would say yes on all accounts and add that I don't get much out of it more than "people who abuse power are bad." (and eating poo is gross.) I'm on the fence about this one. I really only knew about it from it's notoriety and that's primarily the one thing it has going for it. I don't find the acting or story that great (that post sound synch really screws with me).

In general this film is not recommended unless you know what you're getting in for. It's slow going and doesn't have a very satisfying ending, not because it's sad but because there are no major protagonists that you are following though this ordeal so it's just a series of increasingly worse events that just stops once the running time is up. It's very open to interpretations, i'll give it that, so maybe you might get something more out of it. I'm too lazy to do the research into Facscism and Pasolini or whatever else might help make sense of all this, I just wanted to see how graphic it really was. Not nearly as bad the second time through (but looks stunning on bluray for a film this old, especially compared to the previous version I saw).